


flesh and the machine

by d__T



Category: Blood Drive (TV)
Genre: Android Character, Attempted Suicide, Body Horror, Disembowelment, Tags as warnings, goretober prompts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-25 06:54:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16192391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/d__T/pseuds/d__T
Summary: Aki wakes up in a strange place with the worst headache of her life. It gets worse.





	flesh and the machine

“Hello, Aki.” A voice inside her head says. “Hello, Aki.” It’s a gentle, calm, soothing voice. “Hello, Aki.” Measured and surrounding.

“Hello, Aki.”

It’s so loud, it’s the only thing she can hear and it’s not even a sound.

“Hello, Aki.”

It’s deafening, searing, splitting her head open; she’s gonna spill her own brains to get out from under this voice in her  head . She can’t move, can’t even see, can’t-

“Hello, Aki.”

“Hello, Aki.”

She gathers everything she’s got, not much at all, and screams back  **_shut up!_**

There’s no air in her lungs, not a molecule to make sound with and yet her voice hisses. A scrolled radio, tubes not warm yet. She gasps, desperately trying to breathe. Her chest isn’t even moving; she’s drowning in  nothing at all.

“Oh, you’re awake.”

Suddenly air floods her lungs and so many things shift. There’s processes starting in her body. She can feel all of them, remotely, painfully, like ice water poured through her intestines.

“Yes, I’m awake.”

“I am Tartarus.”

“You are  _so loud_ .” she feels like she’s gonna puke. Breathing doesn’t seem to mean that she can do anything else, so she opts for screaming some more like it’s a reasoned decision instead of desperation.

“I am turning your optics on now.”

What.

 

 

Everything is green, hazy, foggy, pixelating. The vague nebula of it is infinitely more reassuring than the complex nothing that was before.

“We expect a delay before normal vision resumes.”

 

* * *

 

Everything feels wrong. She’s cold, so cold. Text in her eyes, voices in her head, veins flat and empty.

Does she even have them anymore?

Alive, somehow. Breathing optional.

The scrubs they gave her to wear are loose and soft and too big and mint-teal colored. It’s terrible with her skin and her eyes- they’re luminous green now with something glowing and synthetic in the irises. She’d feel like a fighter jet if she didn’t want to tear them out.

She pulls the top off over her head, automatically shaking her hair back into place. She stares back at herself in the mirror, feeling so small. Overwhelmed. Better without the shirt nearly draping off her  shoulder and dwarfing her body .

Tartarus keeps telling her that she’s an AI, a robot, an android. A synthetic being who has been created new.

All that anime, her mother would say, ruining her brain.

She remembers.

She strips the pants off. Naked now, tiles cold under her cold feet. She looks down at herself. They’d made her pale. A disgrace. She rubs a hand over her breasts and belly. Soft, smooth, fake.

She digs her fingers in.

“You can’t do that.” Tartarus says in her mind.

“Watch me.” She says, and pulls.

Skin shifts under her fingers, layers separating and sliding like plastic and jello.

This should hurt. “Watch me, Tartarus.” She says in her modulated voice. It doesn’t hurt.

She pulls harder, distorting her flesh. Stretching. The bonds inside her separating; she can feel them snapping like rubber bands. This should hurt.

The chunk comes off in her hand. There’s a ragged hole in her belly, tattered thin plastic edges over some kind of clearish film. It’s hard to look into her body, the body that she’s in. She digs her fingers in and the film feels like the fascia of chicken. She plows her fingers through, and retches. Instinctual. Useless. Just like breathing.

“Aki.” Tartarus says. “Don’t.”

She rips the hole open and shoves her hand in. Still cold, no matter how far in she digs. Slick but not slimy, this isn’t a human body. She’s dead she’s dead she’s  _dead_

Her fingers close around something bone hard where no bone should be. She yanks.

Warnings flash in her mind, little orange triangles, and then it comes free. Blue liquid gushes down her arm, her belly, her thighs. The warnings go solid and the gush abruptly cuts off, some kind of automatic process protecting her.

“Aki.” Tartarus says, immense in her mind. “I will assume control.”

Desperate, she plunges her hand back in and yanks at something else. She can feel it in her chest and her pelvis, like she’s gonna pull her heart and cunt out like beads on two ends of a string. Green goo leaks down her arm.

“Fuck you, Tartarus.” She says. “I know what I am.”

Something destabilizes; she’s on the floor in a puddle of pink fluid. It reeks.

She laughs, crazed and afraid. “I don’t belong to you. I won’t ever belong to you.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Hello, Aki.” The voice in her head says.

“Hello, Tartarus.”

“You’re feeling better?”

She looks in her memories for a status. She says, “Runtime 1m 34s, no errors or warnings to report.”


End file.
